Providing Continuity of Knowledge (CoK) on feed, product and tails material is of ever-growing concern, in particular in fields relating to nuclear safety. Indeed, assuring Continuity of Knowledge for example in UF6 cylinder transportation and storage has to date posed a substantial challenge to the IAEA. Control of the stored unsealed cylinders is also a challenge.
Identification is one of the components required to be part of a surveillance module which also includes weighing scales and camera surveillance. Currently, UF6 cylinders can only be manually identified by steel ID plates, welded in place or riveted or bolted to the front of the cylinders, and cannot be authenticated by any reasonable method. The amount of work required to clearly identify and account the cylinders is substantial since the IAEA inspector would have to maintain a double accountancy: the facility identification code (no possible trusted authentication of the paper labeling) and the manufacturer labeling of the cylinder.
Using the existing surveillance cameras turned out not to be feasible since their resolution is too low in order to allow a unique identification. A second approach pursued by the IAEA was the use of dedicated unique identification tags (LBIMS project). However, this approach also had a number of significant drawbacks: Firstly, tampering with the tags was an obvious concern. Secondly, it turned out to be very difficult to find a fast, reliable and cost-efficient way to permanently attach the tags to the cylinders.